The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has maintained a super-majority in
the National Assembly for over forty years despite increasingly competitive
elections. Several factors contribute to the BDP’s continued legislative dominance,
including features of the electoral system, fragmentation of the party
system, and obstacles to strategic voting behaviour. Factional competition has
played a particularly important role. Botswana’s political institutions encourage
factional competition, and factionalism interacts with the electoral system to
hinder consolidation of the party system. Botswana’s experience underlines
the importance of internal party dynamics and their interaction with features of
the electoral and party system in enabling the persistence of legislative
dominance in competitive electoral systems.